Remedying Misperceptions of Computer Science among Middle School Students Shuchi Grover
Roy Pea
Stephen Cooper
Graduate School of Education Stanford University Stanford, CA 94305
Graduate School of Education/ H-STAR Institute Stanford University Stanford, CA 94305
Computer Science Department Stanford University Stanford, CA 94305
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
claimed that “CS has a fundamental image problem”, and also asserted that students finishing high school have a difficult time seeing themselves as computer scientists since they do not have a clear understanding of what computer science is and what a computer scientist does. It therefore appears that misconceptions and a lack of awareness of computer science as a discipline potentially contribute to a lack of interest that in turn results in students not opting to enroll in a CS course in high school or beyond. Echoing past research that ties students’ disinterest in CS to lack of familiarity with the subject [2], Hewner [9] supports the belief that “Students with an incomplete view of the field of CS might make poor educational decisions”. To remedy the situation, therefore, student perceptions of the discipline of CS must develop early on in their school career and must also move beyond hardware, software, and programming to encompass a more realistic, broader, real-world context- as a discipline that equips students to build and use powerful tools to solve complex problems in service to society [13, 21].
ABSTRACT Past research points to gross misperceptions of the discipline of computer science among students in middle and high school. As efforts to introduce computing education in K-12 gains traction in tandem with initiatives that address issues of interest and attitudes towards CS, misperceptions of computing as a discipline must also be addressed as early as middle school, since that is a key stage for identity building. This paper shares the results of a curricular intervention that aims to show CS to students in a new light- in real world contexts and as a creative and problem-solving discipline; as something bigger and broader than the “computercentric” view that many students are known to harbor.
Categories and Subject Descriptors K.3.2 [Computers and Education]: Computer and Information Science Education - Computer Science Education, Curriculum, Literacy K.7.1[The Computing Profession]: Occupations
Keywords
When might be an appropriate time to do this? Middle school is a time for identity building, as children develop their affinity for and association with specific academic fields. This is supported by findings that eighth grade students who expected to enter a science-related career were much more likely to major in a science discipline than students who did not have science career aspirations at the end of eighth grade [18]. While elementary school children have ill-informed career aspirations, the middle school years, in contrast, represent a critical juncture in the K-12 educational journey to provide experiences that allow students to be open to diverse future opportunities as part of their “possible selves” [12]. Therefore any effort to broaden participation in a discipline must consider these years as critical.
Middle School Computer Science Education, Perceptions of Computing, Identity, K-12 curriculum development, Definition of Computer Science.
1. INTRODUCTION Recent years have seen a growing consensus around the view that all children must learn computational thinking [20] and be offered introductory exposure to computer science in K-12. Grover & Pea [7] provide a synthesis of several recent efforts among researchers and educators working in concert with organizations such as CSTA to define guidelines for and design K-12 (especially high school) curricula. Although the numbers for students enrolling for CS courses in high schools across most of the nation is increasing [16] there is still a huge gap that must be bridged to meet the demands of a growing job market in CS (http://goo.gl/gxfmI). In addition to curricular efforts aimed at developing the required thinking skills, there are initiatives aimed at making CS a more attractive career choice especially for females and underrepresented minorities [17]. Prior research overwhelmingly reports a lack of awareness of the discipline coupled with negative attitudes towards Computer Science among students [2, 6, 13, 15, 21]. Martin [13]
This paper presents the results of research in the context of a middle school introductory computer science and programming curriculum that also consciously attempts to address issues of (mis)-perceptions of computing among 12 to 14 year olds. The goal was to answer the research question: What is the change, if any, in middle school students’ perceptions of computer science as a result of a 6-week introductory CS curriculum that is designed to include curricular materials aimed at increasing awareness of computer science as a discipline?
2. RELATED WORK
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There have been a number of studies on student perceptions of computer science that have been conducted at the middle and high school levels as well as at the undergraduate level. Regardless of school level, the results have overwhelmingly pointed to similar patterns in the narrow view of computer science held by students that is far off the mark, divorced from the reality of what computer scientists usually do. It is worth noting however these
http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2538862.2538934
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semester. The research questions were aimed at ascertaining student perceptions of CS in addition to student attitudes towards computer science and their intent in studying and working in this field. The results of the mixed-methods study were mixed and showed some growth in students’ perceptions of CS as a result of the curriculum.
although earlier studies have extensively investigated perceptions of computer science, they don’t appear to have studied the effects of consciously attempting to remedy them. The remainder of this section describes the studies that influenced our research. Surveying over 800 high school students, Carter [2] found that students largely lacked formal classroom experience in computing, and the vast majority had no idea whatsoever of what it meant to study computer science in college. Among those that gave some response, many thought of CS as involving programming, repairing or building computers, knowing about how computers work and miscellaneous “computer stuff”. The study concluded that lack of education was responsible for this ignorance and one of the recommendations was to “fix computer science’s image” by educating students on how computing is really used in the real world – “for special effects in movies, to improve the quality of life for people with missing limbs, and for allowing communication for people with speech impediments.”
More recently, Fidoten and Spacco [5] used quantitative surveys employing questions with Likert-scale responses to survey nonCS undergraduate faculty about what CS is. The title of their paper, “What Do Computer Scientists Do?” served as inspiration for the open response question used in this research. Additionally, as in [21], our research also included college students as a comparative data set.
3. METHODOLOGY This section describes preliminary research (Study #0) and the first iteration (Study #1) of a design-based research study in the context of a 6-week middle school curriculum titled “Foundations for Advancing Computational Thinking” (FACT) designed to include elements aimed at consciously building awareness of computing as a discipline while promoting engagement with foundational computational concepts such as algorithmic flow of control comprising (a) sequence (b) looping constructs and (c) conditional logic through the use of the Scratch programming environment. A second iteration of this research with FACT (Study #2) has recently concluded, and we share preliminary results from that as well.
Yardi and Bruckman’s study [21] encompassed students aged 11 to 20, as well as graduate students for a comparative data set. Interviews with tech-savvy teenagers indicated a lack of interest in computer science and stereotypical views of the discipline as being difficult, boring, and asocial. In contrast, responses from graduate students led the authors to recommend exposing children to the real-world relevance of computing and the diversity of career paths, using students’ interest in games as an entry point, the need for underscoring computing as a creative discipline, and the importance of role models. Martin [13] had incoming freshmen answer the question “What is computer science?” in addition to drawing a picture of a computer scientist. The majority of the students answered the question with a reference to programming and mentioned the study of hardware and software. In the drawing, none of the drawings by incoming freshmen showed attractive, appealing, or normal looking people. By contrast, more upper-level undergrads (including females and African Americans) drew people that looked like themselves and were patently able to view themselves as computer scientists suggesting that learning about CS helped change the image of CS.
3.1 Preliminary Exploration of Student Perceptions of Computing The preliminary phase of this research was an exploratory study (Study #0) that provided baseline insights into commonly held notions of computer science among middle school students. The sample comprised 23 students (20 male, 3 female; mean age ~12.7 years) in a San Francisco Bay Area public middle school enrolled in an elective class that involved making “computer creations” using Flash and a Scratch-like programming environment. (Note that this curriculum was unrelated to our FACT curriculum described below.) Participants were asked to answer the question: “In your view, what does a computer scientist do?”
Related findings for middle school students have been reported on two studies using surveys, drawings and interviews to examine sixth- and eighth grade students’ perceptions of knowledgeable computer users and their self-perception as a ‘computer-type person’ [14]. Students were asked in one study to generate representations of computer users in pictures or words. In the second study, students were asked whether they believed that there was such a thing as a computer-type person and whether they perceived themselves to be one. Both studies suggest that while there is a male image of computer science in general, it is not overly negative and students’ self-perception is not governed by their own gender as much as by other variables.
A comparative data set was gathered by asking the same question of 168 college students in a major university in the same geographic area who had just completed a CS1 course that introduced students to Java and software engineering principles including object-oriented design, decomposition, encapsulation, abstraction, and testing. All the responses were initially open coded and after the major categories depicting the responses emerged, a researcher unconnected to the research then coded all the responses. Figure 1 below depicts this coding as percentage values, where the numerator is the number of occurrences belonging to that coding category and the denominator is the sum total of responses across all categories. The difference in the response patterns between the two populations was stark. This despite the fact that the middle school students had engaged in a fair amount of programming at the time they were surveyed. The majority of middle school students’ responses mostly spoke of “studying” and “building” new computers, programming (apps or video games), or notions of research and ‘experimentation’ (presumably inspired by the term ‘science’ in ‘computer science’). As observed in earlier research, there were few references to problem solving or real
Questions similar to the ones in these studies were employed by Greening [6] in investigations of high school students who were asked to complete the sentence “Computer Science is mostly about…” and found most responses to be either null (no response), “trivial” or “computer-centric”, and pointed to a weakness in the basis by which students choose to study (or not study) computing. In terms of empirically testing how a curriculum shapes students’ perceptions of computing, Taub, Armoni and Ben-Ari [19] surveyed and interviewed middle school students who were exposed to CS Unplugged activities [1] over the course of a
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about the real nature of computer science. The second goal was to get them motivated and excited about the remainder of the course that was devoted to introducing computational concepts through the use of the Scratch programming environment. Inspired by recommendations from earlier research to give students a sense for exemplary societal uses of CS such as “for special effects in movies, to improve the quality of life for people” [2], ‘Computing is Everywhere’ was designed so that students would see examples of computing being used for varied purposes and in diverse fields. It was decided that there would be showing rather than telling during this time, so that students would develop a deeper sense of CS through watching and reflecting on real examples of the nature of computer scientists’ work.
world societal uses of computing that dominated responses from undergraduates. These responses from middle schoolers were very similar to those found in prior research to suggest that notions of CS for this middle school age population revolve around the machine, and are “computer-centric”. Although one middle school student wrote that “[a computer scientist] sits at a computer and presses the buttons,” such stereotypical views were not expressed more commonly.
For this purpose, about 7 publicly available videos ranging between 1.5 and 6 minutes in length were identified on YouTube. For example, we chose videos like M.I.T. Computer Program Reveals Invisible Motion in Video and Untangling the hairy physics of Rapunzel that exemplified innovations in computing in ways that we believed kids would find interesting and also demonstrated computing being used in a context most children would not likely associate with computer science. The video of Sebastian Thrun’s TED talk on Google’s driverless car was an example of a CS project driven by a need to tackle the problem of fatalities in automobile accidents. Also included in this unit were a few videos created by CSEdWeek, such as http://y2u.be/t4nThJjI8yI. In addition to these, the lead researcher (and first author) recorded “vignettes of people and computing” - short 1-3 minute videos of diverse people in different fields describing how they used computing in their work. Some videos also included a brief demonstration of what they described. This video repository can be found at http://goo.gl/oatj4H.
Figure 1: “What does a Computer Scientist do?” Responses from Middle School and College Students who had just completed a college-level CS1 course The responses of the college students, in contrast, were closer to a mature view of computing as a problem solving discipline where computers were used to solve a real world issue or improve lives, rather than a discipline aimed at studying about, or building, computers. Also interesting among the college students’ responses was the additional expressiveness that characterized their responses. Close to half the students either used some adverbs or notion of process to describe the act of programming or computation; words and phrases such as creatively, logically, reliably, efficiently, and via computation, by decomposing, applying known skills. Admittedly college students are not only older, but more importantly, their views were patently shaped by a college-level introductory CS course they had just completed.
3.3 Methods and Data Measures 3.3.1 Participants For Study #1, the FACT curriculum was taught for six weeks in April-May, 2013 in a public middle school classroom in the San Francisco Bay Area (distinct from the Study #0 school site). The student sample comprised 26 children from 7th and 8th grade (21 boys and 5 girls, mean age: ~13 years) enrolled in a semester-long “Computers” elective class.
We believe that introducing CS as a problem solving discipline that involves using computers to solve real world problems or improve lives, rather than simply understanding, studying, building or fixing computers, provides an importantly expansive framing [3] of computer science since it may foster an expectation that students will continue to use what they learn later in creative and productive activities rather than simply being focused on computers themselves. This preliminary investigation thus helped set the goals of this research, which was to examine whether an introductory CS/programming elective in middle school could be designed to help develop students’ perceptions of computing so that it encompasses a more accurate problem-solving and realworld context.
For Study #2, the FACT curriculum was taught in Sept-Oct, 2013 in the same middle school setting as Study #1 with a new cohort of students in the “Computers” elective class (19 boys, 9 girls, mean age: ~12.32 years). The data from this study is currently being analyzed, and only some preliminary results are shared in this paper. The sections below focus primarily on results from Study #1.
3.3.2 Procedures The class met for 55 minutes each day four times per week. The lead researcher on this effort was also the curriculum developer and teacher for the pilot 6-week FACT mini-course. The classroom teacher was present in the class at all times and in her own words, was “learning alongside the students” as she was relatively unfamiliar with programming and CS. She hopes to able to use the FACT curriculum in the future. Each ‘Session’ described in Table 1 below is equivalent to one 55-minute period.
3.2 Curriculum Design to Address Perceptions of Computer Science In keeping with the aforementioned goals, the FACT curriculum was designed to raise awareness among the students about computing as a discipline, what computer scientists do and the role CS plays in our world and daily lives today. The first weeklong unit titled ‘Computing is Everywhere’ had two goals. The first was to remedy misconceptions and educate students
For Study #2, largely the same curriculum was taught. Other more interesting videos based on student feedback replaced some of the ones used in Study #1. Additionally, we included one publicly
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Table 1: Description of Week 1 Curriculum Session ** Students watched 4 short videos from among the videos identified as described in Section 3.2 1
** Students are asked to share their reactions to the videos on the discussion forums on Schoology, the course LMS used by the school. **Students shared their reactions to an image (from a publicly available Exploring CS curriculum https://onramps.instructure.com/courses/723227) of a busy street intersection with people, vehicles, traffic signals and other everyday objects. They were asked to identify all the things they saw where computing devices or computation were being used. Session **Students watched a couple of videos (created by organizations such as NSF and CS EdWeek) that speak what 2 CS is and its relevance in many fields of human endeavor. **Additionally students watched some “vignettes of people and computing” as described above ** Students were asked to comment on the videos on Schoology after they watched each one, and comment on which video vignette they liked the best. ** They also participated in an online discussion (on Schoology) on how they use computers and computational devices in their daily lives. Session Students watched a brief video of a CS professor describing briefly what computing is and the kinds of things that 3 computer scientists do (along with a few examples). This was followed by a whole classroom discussion led by the facilitator-researcher on the nature of computer science that included talking about the distinction between programmers and computer scientists. Students answered some more questions and discussion prompts.
available video on YouTube (similar to those shown in week 1) and one “vignette of people & computing” every week in weeks 2 to 5 (in addition to those shown in week 1). This was done to reinforce ideas of real-world applicability of computing even as students proceeded to learn computational constructs and associated programming techniques.
3.3.3 Data Measures The following data were gathered before, during and after the 6week intervention. a) b) c) d) e)
Figure 2: Post-Video Student Sentiments about CS (Day 2) Table 2: Sample Student Reactions to Videos (Study #1) I learned that Computer Science is not just programming, and coding. I found out that computing is part of everyday life. Computer science can be used everywhere. For me, I really enjoyed Amit’s video, not only because his invention was really cool, but because it was created by computer science and programming. Also, I think that the person in the third video created a creative program. It's one of the first times I've seen something like that. I liked the second video with the music because that's something that I can relate to. I love music so I like things that have to do with music. When I thought of computer science before the video I think of computers and only about computers. But now I see that computer science goes so much further than that. Now I can't think of anything that doesn't use computer science. It's really cool. I like the second video... It was a fun way to combine programming with music and art to create some music. I learned how much CS can be used to create something for fun, not just work-- for example, the Beat Table, and Evelyn's line program. The fun programs are what really changes the world immediately, as it affects more people than medical programs, for example Some of the most interesting computer science videos I've seen I think, And I now really want to learn more about coding and what I can do with it.
A Pre-Survey that included the question: “What do computer scientists do?” Pre-Post surveys on student interest in CS as in [4]. Student reactions to each of the videos they watched. Post-survey responses to the question: “What do computer scientists do?” at the end of the 6-week FACT intervention. As described in Section 3.1, the same question regarding computer scientists was asked of 168 college students at the end of their CS1 class (Study #0).
4. DATA ANALYSIS AND DISCUSSION 26 student responses to the discussion prompt at the end of Session 2 were open coded and the major categories depicting the responses that emerged were: (1) positive adjectives about CS (e.g. awesome, amazing, cool, exciting), (2) real-world and broad applicability of CS, (3) expression of intent to learn more about CS, (4) seeing CS in a new light (or a way they had not thought of before), and (5) commenting on the use of CS for creative expression. The following figure shows the frequency of occurrences of the responses in the various coding categories. Table 2 quotes sample reactions from students that were coded as seen in Figure 2.
Figure 3: (Study #1) “What does a Computer Scientist do?” PrePost intervention responses from middle school students The second set of data analyzed were the pre/post responses to the question, What do computer scientists do?, that were given before the start and after the end of the FACT course (Figure 3). The codes used to analyze these responses were the same as those used
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respectively. Further analysis of data and students’ interest-related responses, especially in Study #2 is currently underway.
in Study#0- the preliminary study of middle school and undergraduate respondents. A researcher unconnected to the project coded the responses. Figure 4 below compares students’ post-FACT responses with the responses of college students after their introductory course on software engineering (gathered in Study #0). Figures 3 and 4 represent a percentage value, where the numerator is the number of occurrences belonging to that coding category and the denominator is the sum total of responses across all categories. It is worth noting that some categories are not reflected on the chart (e.g. “process descriptions”, “vague responses”), but their occurrences are counted towards the denominator. As before, responses of middle school students lacked the expressiveness of college students and were lacking in terms like ‘logically’, ‘computationally’, ‘efficiently’ and ‘reliably’, which characterized undergraduates’ responses.
4.1 Discussion of Results It is not surprising that the pre-course responses as to what computer scientists do focused heavily on notions of building, fixing, studying or improving computers with complete absence of the real world applications of computing to solve problems in various domains. This was in keeping with the results of the preliminary study, as well as with past research that shows students’ inclination to describe CS in terms of hardware and software [13] and computer-centered and contrived answers [6] and lacking a real-world context [21]. Post-course responses, which were taken 6 weeks after the initial week that had the students watching videos about applications of computer science as part of the ‘Computing is Everywhere’ unit, showed persistence of the idea of CS as a problem-solving discipline that helps make our lives easier. The comparison of student responses before and after the curricular intervention indicates a marked positive shift in student perceptions of computer science toward the more mature perspectives of the college CS undergraduates in Study #0. The middle schoolers’ responses post our intervention are comparable to those of college students in most categories; and our students outperformed the college students especially in the categories related to the problem-solving nature of CS, the use of computer as a tool and the real-world application of computer science to make people’s lives easier. This despite that fact that in Study #1, after the first week the students did not watch any more videos and were immersed in learning about algorithms, programs, and ideas of sequence, loops and conditionals in programs.
Figure 4: “What does a Computer Scientist do?” Post-survey responses from middle school students compared with those of college students (who had finished a college-level CS1 course)
5. CONCLUSIONS & FUTURE WORK
Figure 5 below compares shows the frequency of occurrences of the responses in the various coding categories between Study #1 and Study #2. Responses in Study #2 also included more process descriptions and expressiveness. That and the increase in the overall count of the desired perceptions of computing suggest that the improvements to the FACT curriculum were successful.
Although we are still in the process of analyzing additional data gathered during this research (especially from Study #2), the results of this iterative research are very encouraging. Several schools are taking the initiative to teach programming and introductory computing. However, as evidenced in preliminary investigations conducted (in Study #0), even as middle school students are increasingly engaging in programming and computational experiences, there is little attention given to consciously educating them about CS as a discipline. As a result, they have little idea of what computer science as a career entails or the broad applicability of computer science in many diverse fields of human endeavor, including creative fields and altruistic careers that may appeal to females, as indicated by research on the “technological imaginations” of boys and girls [10]. The research makes a significant contribution to the field in the form of a curriculum that aims to remedy student misperceptions and succeeds in achieving this goal. This study demonstrates that it does not take much instruction per se to make a difference in students’ notions of computer science. Such a strategy and curriculum could therefore be easily adopted in schools including those that are lacking teacher capacity for a dedicated CS or programming class. Inviting guest speakers from different CS careers to speak to students about their work has often been suggested as a strategy to get young teens interested in the field [11]. In the absence of access to such people, even short publicly available videos or the “vignettes of computing” suite of videos created for this curriculum can be re-used in any school setting. In fact, this was successfully attempted at a recent hour-long class titled “What do computer scientists (really) do?” taught to 55
Figure 5: “What does a Computer Scientist do?” Study #1 vs. Study #2: Post-intervention responses from middle schoolers Lastly, student responses to survey questions dealing with interest were analyzed. In response to the question “I like computing” on a 4-point likert scale (1=Strongly Agree; 4=Strongly Disagree), the net response from pre- to post-FACT was unchanged in Study #1, but registered a net gain of 5 points in Study #2. Huge swings in this were not expected as most students had self-selected into the elective class and were expected to have high interest- the average for the pre-FACT responses in Study #1 & #2 was 1.57 and 1.67,
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students by the lead author and researcher through the Stanford Splash program (https://www.stanfordesp.org/). It included a version of this curriculum with the six top videos voted as favorites in student surveys at the end of Study #2.
[6] Greening. T. 1998. Computer science: through the eyes of potential students. In Proceedings of the 3rd Australasian conference on Computer science education, pages 145–154, The University of Queensland, Australia, 1998. ACM.
The validity and generalizability of this research is somewhat limited by relatively small sample sizes, and small numbers of female students and minorities. Given that the ideas and curricular intervention (of using engaging and relevant videos) is relatively simple, it would be easy to try this in diverse settings with larger numbers of students, especially from underrepresented groups in computer science like female students and minorities.
[7] Grover, S. and Pea, R. 2013. Computational Thinking in K– 12 A Review of the State of the Field. Educational Researcher, 42(1), 38-43. [8] Hewner,M. and Guzdial.M. 2008. Attitudes about computing in postsecondary graduates. In Proceeding of ICER 2008, pages 71–78, Sydney, Australia. ACM. [9] Hewner, M. 2013. Undergraduate conceptions of the field of computer science. In Proceedings of the ninth annual international ACM conference on International computing education research (pp. 107-114). ACM.
How persistent will these views of computer science be in the long-term? It is essential that students’ views of computing fostered in this research should be reinforced in subsequent engagement and experiences with computing in order for their perceptions to persist and for the maintenance of their evident interests in computer science. Past research has suggested that “belief centrality, the students’ previous beliefs about computing may remain central while the things they learned in introductory computing change their peripheral beliefs in smaller ways” [8]. A follow-up study being contemplated is to follow the students in Study #1 and #2 to ask them to revisit the question about what computer scientists do after a period of six months since the curricular intervention.
[10] Honey, M., Moeller, B., Brunner, C., Bennett, D. T., Clements, P., and Hawkins, J. 1991. “Girls and Design: Exploring the Question of Technological Imagination.” Tech Rep. No. 17. New York: Bank Street College of Education, Center for Technology in Education. [11] Kim, K. A., Fann, A. J., & Misa-Escalante, K. O. (2011). Engaging women in computer science and engineering: Promising practices for promoting gender equity in undergraduate research experiences. ACM Transactions on Computing Education (TOCE), 11(2), 8.
As the move to introduce computing to K-12 schools gains momentum, several efforts are underway to change student attitudes towards—and increase interest in—computing. An important piece of this puzzle is remedying students’ misconceptions of computing as a discipline centered on building and fixing computers, and studying about the internals of computers. Making children aware of exemplary societal uses of CS as a creative and engaging discipline with an impact in almost all other domains will certainly help the cause of broadening the CS pipeline and its associated learning trajectories.
[12] Markus, H., and Nurius, P. 1986. Possible selves. American Psychologist, 41, 954-969. [13] Martin, C. D. 2004. Draw a computer scientist. In Working Group Reports on Innovation and Technology in Computer Science Education (ITiCSE-WGR’04). 11–12. [14] Mercier, E. M., Barron, B., and O'Connor, K. M. 2006. Images of self and others as computer users: The role of gender and experience. Journal of Computer Assisted Learning, 22(5), 335-348.
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